I was not a twitter fan. I can barely stand facebook. I don't see the need to post one's entire life onto a public domain for the world to see. I do have a facebook, it is a necessary evil these days. I guess the thing that bothers me the most is that people think it can take the place of face to face communication. If i want to talk to someone, I will call them for dinner or coffee or just to hang out. My feelings towards can be summed up by the link below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVA047JAQsk
Given my experience with facebook, I assumed twitter be worst. I viewed twitter as facebook, except with the good parts taken out. Facebook with just the status updates? Sounds terrible.
After two weeks of twittering, my worst fears were confirmed. I learned nothing useful in my two weeks. All i recieved was mostly useless banter. I'll list the three worst experiencs.
First off, within an hour of joining, I had five people following me, none of whom I knew. To make it worse, four of these five were people attempting to convince me to join....uh....adult....websites. This trend of random strangers and groups deciding to follow me continued throughout the two weeks. I do not want these vultures following me, I do not want to be associated with these groups. The fact that every time i logged on there was some new annoyance to block was just disgraceful.
Secondly, the information shared by those I chose to follow was usually pointless. I don't care that it is raining outside. Or you are having a good day :). I don't follow status updates on facebook, so a program that only contains status updates is not for me. I will admit that there were some interesting articles posted by my classmates. Also, following the New York Times supplied me with some extra current events. I was dissapointed by some of the groups that I followed such as The Economist, their posts were limited.
Finally, the various functions of twitter are confusing! I would often end up posting my status twice because I would mess up on the tag at the end. Direct messages also gave me trouble. I'm pretty sure I accidentally messaged some very confused strangers because of my inability to master the various functions of twitter. However, I will admit that if I spent some more time on twitter I would have gotten used to it.
So call me a luddite, call me old fashioned. But after this two week trial, twitter and I will be ending our relationship.
1 comment:
I found myself agreeing with a lot of what you said about twitter. I also watched the video you posted about facebook which was pretty hilarious. I do think that Twitter does have it's pros though. I agree that mostly it's just stupid status updates, but we had to follow certain people in order to respond to them for class. Now that the project is over, you can follow whoever you want, and can delete the people who annoyed you. I suggest following more news outlets like the Shepherd Express--it's a small Milwaukee local paper that has a lot of entertainment info about Milwaukee. It seems like you were disappointed with some other news sources, so I suggest you follow and find more! And I think now that the project is over, you can make your Twitter account private so random people won't start following you. Even though it's somewhat strange, you can also follow celebrities and I think that in itself is pretty cool. I started following Stephen Colbert and he has the weirdest and most ridiculous status updates. So, even though you seem like you've made up your mind, I say maybe consider these things for the future, for a day when you're bored and facebook is not exciting and you don't have any email to check. You might find out something interesting. That's how I use my Twitter.
-Maureen
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